The B2B marketers who see the most success are the ones who are able to accurately and efficiently measure their strategies to make quick pivots that generate optimal results. By relying on measurable and actionable KPIs, you’ll be equipped to make informed decisions on how to iterate your strategy to better engage and convert your prospective customers.
Effective measurement is also the key to reporting on marketing success in a way that’s easy for stakeholders to understand and directly proves the return on investment. At the end of the day, senior leaders care about revenue growth, and while vanity metrics, like social media followers or email open rates, might sound good, they don’t say anything about how your efforts are impacting your business’s bottom line. In order to find alignment and get buy-in for your marketing strategy, it’s essential to measure and report on metrics tied to business objectives, while also making the data accessible to relevant stakeholders across departments.
While there are various data points you can measure to gauge marketing success, here are the key metrics you should be focused on:
Engagement Rate
While engagement rate provides a helpful representation of marketing performance based on metrics like page views, email opens and ad clicks, senior leaders likely care more about the bigger picture. Rather than focusing on micro-level engagement metrics in your reporting, find ways to weave stand-out engagement data into the narrative of overarching marketing success so you can tell an impactful story.
Although it may not be the most important metric from a reporting standpoint, measuring engagement rate can help your marketing team assess the level of audience interaction your campaigns are driving. This will give you insight into the quality of your content and whether or not your message is resonating with your target audience so you can iterate as needed. When tracking your engagement rate, look into trends in both top-performing and low-performing assets to determine how to effectively adjust your messaging or content strategy to better engage and meet the needs of your prospects going forward.
Conversion Rate
If you’re not converting leads with your marketing efforts, you’re ultimately wasting time and money. Depending on your industry or the nature of your business, a conversion can mean different things, like a lead becoming an opportunity or a prospect filling out a contact form on your website. In any case, conversion rate is an important metric for measuring the impact marketing programs have on turning a prospect into a paying customer.
While conversion rate isn’t the ultimate measure of marketing success, it’s a helpful tool for proving marketing’s influence on achieving business objectives and can help inform decisions on how to efficiently advance buyers through the funnel with the right content, at the right time and in the right place. By measuring conversion rates across your programs, you can make necessary adjustments to low-performing channels or tactics, or continue to optimize the programs already generating high levels of conversion.
Customer Profile
Even if you’re generating leads or seeing high conversion rates from your marketing efforts, senior leaders won’t view them as a success if you’re bringing in the wrong people. Track similarities and differences between your ideal customer profile (ICP) and your actual customers to surface insights into whether your efforts are reaching and converting the appropriate audience for your business.
Keep in mind that in order to see success from your marketing efforts, you need to be engaging with your target audience in the places they’re most active. Analyzing your customer profile can help you identify if you’re leveraging the appropriate channels or platforms for your ICP so you can make shifts as needed. Diving into trends within your customer profiles, such as title, industry and company size, can also help you make informed decisions about targeting new audiences or marketing new product lines.
Velocity
How quickly does a lead become an opportunity? Opportunity to close a new account? How do marketing activities influence that timeline? Measuring velocity, or how quickly prospects and deals move through the pipeline to generate revenue, can help you report on the rate at which your marketing efforts are yielding real business results. By calculating your pipeline velocity, you’ll be equipped to assess the efficiency of both your team and the tools you have in place to execute your programs. Velocity can also help determine the level of engagement through all stages of the funnel so you can identify where you should be focusing your efforts to positively impact revenue goals.
Win Rate
Win rate is an essential bottom-of-the-funnel metric for marketers as it gives you a gauge on how marketing activities influence how often you’re winning new business. Calculating the win rate, or the ratio of closed-won opportunities to all closed opportunities within the same time frame, is simple to do and can provide key insights on how to best iterate your strategy to increase pipeline volume.
After you measure your win rate, consider the underlying factors that influenced it. Are there patterns within the customer journey of the opportunities you won compared to the ones you lost? Did you have an impactful piece of content that drove high-quality opportunities? By analyzing how different marketing channels or tactics affect win rate, you can better allocate your budget and make adjustments to your content strategy to improve your win rate over time.
Contract Size
How big are marketing-influenced deals? How does your opportunity pipeline compare to closed-won revenue? Understanding contract size can help you determine the number of opportunities you need to create from your marketing activities to reach your revenue goals. Measuring contract size can also help you assess which programs are generating larger revenue opportunities for your business so you can prove their success to senior leadership and continue to focus your efforts on them.
Products/Services of Interest
Are your marketing programs generating leads and opportunities for your intended product or service lines, industry targets or geographies? If your business is working to grow in a certain direction, it’s important to measure and report on your initiatives’ impact on those areas. Identifying whether marketing activities are generating interest in your intended offerings can help you assess whether you need to make adjustments to your messaging or channel strategy to effectively promote them. Measuring products or services of interest can also help you identify opportunities for new offerings or get buy-in from senior leaders to move into a new market.
ROI
The most obvious, and most important, KPI every B2B marketer should measure is return on investment, or the amount of revenue your strategy brings in on every dollar spent. ROI ultimately determines what efforts are working and what aren’t. With an integrated marketing strategy, looking at how much revenue each channel is generating can help you identify your most effective channels, as well as the ones that need more investment in order to be profitable. Tracking ROI then allows you to justify your continued investment in successful channels and helps inform how to reallocate funds from less successful ones.
Reporting on marketing performance can be tricky, especially when it comes to measuring success on a multi-channel marketing strategy. But with an optimized tech stack and the right measurement infrastructure in place, you can effectively identify the channels and activities tied to marketing success and make data-driven decisions to improve your performance. Contact us to see how Walker Sands can help you build measurable marketing strategies that accelerate the bottom-line growth of your business.
